The Impact of Authoritative Links, Mentions, and Shares on&nbspRankings

This post was promoted from YouMoz. The author’s views are entirely his or her own (excluding an unlikely case of hypnosis) and may not reflect the views of Moz.

Today I want to share with you some interesting details about research that I've done recently and which I have also presented at SMX Advanced Seattle. We also have a blog on our website where we post most of the interesting things that we are working on. From time to time, we also post articles that solve common problems that people in our industry face everyday. What's interesting about these articles is that once they are published on our blog, in less than five minutes, they rank first in Google when searching for their title.

But it's probably easy to rank first for such a long tail keyword right? How about a three-word keyword?

How about two words? Not bad with virtually no links and just a few shares, right?

Here’s another example. Second place from four billion results with no links to the article.

So what's so special about these articles? Why is Google giving them so much attention?

Second, the article is good enough for people to share it on Twitter, Facebook and Google+. On average, these articles get about 50 to 100 shares total.

What would happen if you would have some very influential people share that content?

Martin Macdonald wrote an article at the end of March about someone who apparently ranked for "camper shoes man" on fifth place without any links to the page. Or so he pretended, because Martin has quickly uncovered his hidden network of links. If you haven't seen this article yet, you should check it out, it’s pretty funny:

But let's look at this story from a different point of view. What Martin tried to do here is prove the guy wrong, that he did need some good amount of links to rank for that keyword.

But he managed to accomplish something that even he did not expect. Martin's article actually outranked everyone on the "camper shoes man" keyword with no actual links, only with some good amount of social shares. He even managed to rank second for “camper shoes”.

So what can you learn from this?

That the title of your content is very important. There is a very strong correlation between the title and the keyword. Do a little research to see how people search for this kind of content before you name it.

That social signals are very important in the early stages of ranking. If your article gets shared by many influential people you get a higher exposure for a limited amount of time.

But are these social signals enough to keep that article to rank well? The answer, as you would expect it, is no.

The data from my research suggests that you get a good exposure for about a week and then you start losing your rankings. If your article is good, this will be enough time for people to start linking to you. Google will then pick up those links and add some important ranking signals to your article.

Unfortunately, that means there is still no long term ranking without some good authoritative links. So let's find out what kind of impact do authoritative links have on rankings.

As you probably already know, Google has more than 200 signals that affect rankings. I have only chosen the ranking factors that are related to links in my research and I have grouped them into the following categories:

Quantity

Diversity

Quality

Relevance

In my research I have analyzed multiple keywords that we are competing for and the link data I used comes from both SEOmoz and Majestic SEO.

In the following charts, you will see the top 10 ranking pages for the keyword that I have chosen as an example. These are rendered on the X axis. Depending on the metric that is shown, the values for this metric will appear on the Y axis.

The line that you see in this chart is how a perfect correlation would look like.

Just keep in mind that you will not be able to see a very good correlation when we look at each metric separately. That’s mainly because all the 200 metrics that the Google algorithm uses work together and they don't have that much value when taken separately.

Also, most of the charts only show data about LRDs because I wanted to eliminate any statistical errors coming from site wide links.

First of all let's look at the quantity of links that these pages have. You can see here both links and linking root domains (LRDs).

There is a surprising large amount of links for the 5th and 6th positions.

Why aren't these websites at the top of these results?

Let's compare exact match and partial match LRDs.

You would think that a larger number of exact and partial links should indicate a better ranking. Well, not anymore. Welcome to 2012! The website on the first position has fewer exact match LRDs than the second website. Not to mention the 5th website.

This looks like having a large number of matching anchors is no longer the definitive answer to higher rankings.

Position no. 6 has a very few number of links with exact match compared to the others. That is probably why it’s not ranking higher. However, it looks like there is a big boost given by the brand signals, even though it has a lower relevance.

The red line shows the number of brand + keyword links. They may be counted by Google as both brand signals and partial match keywords, so many people nowadays say that they work really well. Plus these links look natural so you should not incur any penalties.

Let's look at the first two websites in the chart above. The 2nd place has a lot more LRDs with exact match and they make up 70% of all the LRDs. What’s curious is that there are websites ranking in this SERP with less than 10%. Maybe their anchor text distribution is more natural?

Most of the websites ranking here have pretty high ratios of branded LRDs in their link profile just as it would be natural for any website. The first website seems to have a good combination of both brand and brand + keyword anchors.

The major exceptions, the 2nd and the 5th places make us think that with their large number of exact and partial links they would have ranked higher if only they would have a higher number of branded links.

Looking at the percentages, it’s easier to see that most of the top 10 results have more brand signals than exact match anchor texts.

The only exception here is number 2 which has a lot of exact match anchor LRDs.

But since we are comparing branded links with exact and partial match links, why not do a proper comparison?

Again number 2 seems to be the exception here. All I can say is that the Google spam team still has some work to do.

With a PA over 90, the 6th place should outrank everyone. But it doesn't and we can only think that the reason for this is its lack of relevance pointed earlier in the anchor text analysis.

Most of the results have a higher Page Authority than Domain Authority, which suggests that most of their links are pointing to the page ranking in the results.

Even PageRank, taken by itself, doesn’t have a better correlation.

The new metrics from Majestic, Citation flow and Trust flow, show slightly different results for the 1st website that now appears to be less authoritative than the 2nd and 3rd.

Don’t forget that these metrics have just been released and they apply only to the fresh index, which is only for the links parsed in the last 30-45 days. It would be interesting to see these metrics applied for the historical index.

I have also added here Page Authority from SEOmoz to see how it compares with the new Majestic data. They look pretty similar, but I wonder what happened to the first result.

Here’s the distribution of all links by Page Authority. The two sites with most of the links, 5th and 6th places, are clearly shown here. Number 5 though seems to have a lot of low quality links to it, which are probably ignored by Google. And number 6 has a lot more links with higher authority.

But what happens if we combine Relevance with Quality? Number 6 is gone because it does not have enough links with this anchor text. The only thing that keeps it this high may be the brand signals.

If we remove the 5th place from the chart we can see that the other pages seem to have a pretty good natural profile, with 1st place taking the lead.

If we look at the distribution of brand signals, the 6th place not only has a lot more branded links than all the others, but these links also have a higher authority.

Now let’s combine all four categories: Relevance, Quality, Quantity and Diversity. The blue line is the average authority of the exact match followed LRDs (authority and relevance). The red line shows the number of exact match followed LRDs (quantity and diversity).

As you can see, these two lines are opposing each other. Where authority lacks, quantity compensates. So it looks like all these signals work together. Quantity is lowered by quality. Relevance is still the critical factor. Without it, neither quantity or quality matter.

Conclusions:

Relevance signals are still important, but having too many is not helpful.

Having a lot of brand signals and some relevance is better than having a lot of relevance and no brand or authority.

“If you have 1 million links with anchor text and no brand links then you have a problem.”

I love this quote from David Naylor, and you should definitely do something about it if you are in this situation.

When I first started this research I had hoped that I could at least be able to tell you some of the secrets behind Google’s algorithm. But you know what I found out after gathering and analyzing all this data?

There are no secrets! The algorithm works for you.

Think about it this way.

If you create a great product, what anchor text would people use to link to you? That's right, the name of your product. That's a brand signal.

If you create some great content, how would people link to it? They will probably use some or all the words from the title of your article. Those are exact and partial match anchor text signals.

What happens when all these people share your content or link to it? You become an authority.

So you see, it's not about trying to build authoritative links to your website, it's about becoming an authority yourself.

Stop spending so much time trying to get these links the hard way.

You should spend your valuable time creating a great product that people would want to write about or creating that great content that people would want to share.

That's how you become an authority!

About Philip_Petrescu —
Philip is the CEO and Co-Founder of Caphyon. He started his career in software in 1996 and his passion for search engines led to the creation of Advanced Web Ranking in 2003. You can find Philip on Twitter and Google+.

Great post Philip, and thanks for the time you've spent collecting the data! Another post on your methodology (i.e how to use AWR to fetch some of this data) would be amazing.

Obviously everyone reading this knows about Advanced Web Ranking - but just in case, Philip's not given his stuff the pimp I think it deserves - so if you're not using Advanced Web Ranking, you really should be! I've been using it for a long, long time - it rocks.

I think you did a great job with all the data. I love data driven post! The only thing I would like to see is a break down of the type of links. ie. % of sitewide Vs single page, % of directory Vs editorial.

It seems just about every website audit I do have big similarities in common and that's not enough branded anchor text.

As per my things for articles and website blog, they ranking high than hope page because on blog content is most Relevance to the topic and more keyword reach also search engine find Keywords from Title, URL, and Content so it’s get more authority also fresh content and Google love it so blogs are ranking on top page,

Fantastic article, had to sit down for 20 minutes to really read and absorb it, no skimming allowed. As others have said, I can't believe this is your first post! Look forward to more from you in the future.

I have a question. If I was to start a new business would it be wise to brand my name with my main keyowrd in it? For example if I was a "tire repair" company would it be wise to make my Brand name Donnie'sTireRepair have this as my URL as well. This would always give my site link diversite and branding all in one.

One of the best analytical posts I've read on SEOMoz. However, the conclusion was a bit misleading. Becoming an 'authority' in it of itself doesn't lead to higher SERP placement, otherwise #6 would have fared better, at least according to the metrics you shared. Still, one of the best posts on SEOMoz. Kudos.

I think the reason why #6 is not ranking higher is the lack of relevance. If you become an authority, like #6 here, it will be a lot easier to rank higher with just a few more relevance factors. Time will tell. I will monitor these rankings and let you guys know.

*slowly starts clapping, then increasingly faster, and eventually stands up*

The best I've read this week. Thanks for sharing your findings with us, good sir. I'm quite new to the field and am curious to know your stance on the relevance of the content of the linking page to the external page it is linking to.

Say you have Page A being a blog post talking about the top 5 running shoes the author (who's into running) recommends that links to a product page of a specific type of running shoes on your site.

Then there's Page B, also a blog post but from another site of a somewhat different/non-specific niche like a personal blog where the author shares about what happened to his day and at some point mentions that he bought this type of running shoes (the whole post was too broad, having no specific topic of focus), linking back to the same product page on your site.

Assuming both pages have comparable authority (maybe due to decent readership/following, etc.), and using the same branded anchor text on the links back to your site's page, which of Pages A or B do you think passes a better vote? Does the relevance of the content of a linking page to the external page it is linking to matters? Would be awesome to hear back from you.

Very good point. I wonder though how this applies to sites like personal blogs that likely have a broad range of topics thus ending up linking to a variety of sites in different categories. Maybe it's isolated on the page level. Or maybe Google already had a way of distinguishing these from spammy ones whose primary intent is to build links (think of bought exact-match keyword domains with a simple thesis theme and about 3 to 5 posts where some are not even related to each other, plus exact-match blog roll on the sidebar). Reminds me of how BMR and other article directory/syndication sites work as well.

Thanks for the reply and the resource link, good sir! I'm yet to check it out when I have time. I'm really learning a lot from awesome people like you.

now thats detail! those charts must have taken you hours. interesting to see how social shares only make the article rank temporarily. presumably if those shares kept on building as time went by the article would stay ranked?

The interesting part is that those articles are still ranking well. But they haven't been receiving any new shares, so it's hard to know if they are still ranking because of the initial shares or because of the incoming links that they have earned meanwhile. Time will tell.

Wow, this is one of the most helpful posts I've ever come across. Tons of data. I especially found it interesting (though not really surprising) how much impact social is having on results, especially on temporary rankings. The link data was also very informative. Love it.

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Hi Philip, even if the end of your post seems simple, the advice is important: become an authority. It's so hard that's why people try to manipulate Google algo.

Personnaly I hate the idea of buying links but in some contrats clients wants crap and in order to avoid sell crap, this post, full of data and solid assumptions will be helpful to get out of the black side

Take Rand's idea--buying an existing blog--for example...rather than fork over loads of cash for existing readership, buy a nice expired domain with age and PR, use the internet wayback machine, and build a blog the people want to read. Get links. Link to yourself (or clients), assuming the content is relevant. Insanely powerful.

Great post Philip. I've just seen this live in action for the first time. 13th to 5th for a competitive term in less than three hours. Let's just hope the link value holds strong once the social sharing calms down.

Thought provoking post, Phillip. Here's one for you, I've ranked number 5 for a three-word phrase since March, I was dismissed from G+ for not using my real name (and made no effort to conceal it), have DoFollow set on CommentLuv to every crazy comment that comes in, and have no real theme to my articles (humor, blogging and Swiss Army knives are just some topics). Have about 500 incoming links from sites mostly about blogging, not about the high ranking phrase. Has Google made a mistake?

Great post! I think your conclusion at the end is what everyone knows down deep, but doesn't want to concede.

Here's my question - If a link is embedded within the description text of an image on Facebook, does the sharing/liking of that picture behind the walls of the social network influence search rank in any way?

The charts you see in this post were made with Excel, with data coming from AWR and exported to CSV. You can use the Keyword Difficulty report in Research to get all this data.The nice part is that you no longer have to export it into CSV to see it. All these charts are available in Advanced Web Ranking 9.0.I will try to make a video on how you can do this with AWR.

Nice Philip! I believe that we need to consider our title. The title of our content is very important. There's actually a strong correlation between the title and the keyword. On the other hand, social signals are also very important in the early stages of ranking. If our article gets shared by many influential people, then we get a higher exposure for a limited amount of time.

I am not SEO expert, just a webmaster, no not even a webmaster I am blogger and trying learn SEO. What you did in this post is setting on to prove an apple is perfectly round and after all research, measurement you deduce that apple is not round. What I get from this article is the same old message - write great content.

It's worth doing branding simply so that if you lose your long tail traffic, your fans can find you by typing in your brand name. But other than that, I don't think it helps ranking as much as the gurus are saying

Great article, Phillip! I think we're barely touching the tip of the iceberg on the power of social. With Google+ incorporating more and more to Google search, and Bing with Facebook...social's powers are only going to get stronger. I can't wait to see the research then.

Extremely awesome - So, the goal definitely is to write and create such awesome stuff, that authoritative people want to/need to/would love to! share it. This just reminds me more and more about the need to focus a lot of time and attention on the social spheres, and creating incredible content.

Thanks for this article. I am a new blogger so this is very helpful. It’s hard to know how long it takes to make a successful blog, so “being patient” is among some of the best advice you can give. It’s easy to get discouraged when you don’t see movement, but this give me some encouragement.

Thank you for sharing the data, Philip. Now we can work even further and I suggest all the people that like numbers and graphics that step by step continue sharing. It's fine to be a part of this community.

We watch, learn and continue offering incredible content that helps all the others. This article shows how to become into an authority, that's great and we should think about it.

Very good post and very informational...It is always better to build on the branding and that will bring you a better authority and with that better results. You have rally demostrated that with this post, thanks! Also I would really love to see more information about the correlations of social mentions and the effects it has on the serp

Funny World! The more things change, the more they stay the same. My campaigns, back in the day, have always started with "Thought Leadership" as one of the major KPIs. All social media has done to the mix is , help accelerate that KPI.

At the end of the day, when all is said and done, if you are good at what you do, your ecosystem will reflect that and subsequently, provided the campaign is strucctured well, so will google and hopefully the ROI!

Agreed, spend the lion share of your time creating the content, make it actually really awesome and people will naturally want to share it, cos its cool and it makes them look cool and they keep the cool in their cool bank.. like a finders fee! :D

What a great research... what i find to be a problem.. are niches where you can not give any extra value to the users.. lets say you are trying to rank for a local "hair Salon in Seattle".. so what will be those branded signals? your site url?

I mean in all these local keywords it seems to be hard to be different from the other competitors and become an authority.. so in these cases i have to say, unlike mentioned, you need to spend your time on good seo rather on creating a great product..

In your case, the product is the service you provide. The brand signal is the name of your business and it is also usually found in the domain name.

Now, if you have a great salon, most of the people who talk about it will link to it with the brand name. And that is fine. Only a very few will link to it with the exact match keyword.

What I'm saying is that my research suggests that you don't really need a lot of relevance (exact match anchor texts) to rank well. Having a lot of brand signals will compensate for the lack of relevance.

In my opinion, creating a better product or service is going to help you a lot more than spending your time on creating links. If people like your service, they will talk about it and possibly link to it. And you get to spend your time doing what you do best, your service.

On a different topic, "hair Salon in Seattle" is a complex keyword which contains both relevance and local factors. Ranking in local results is a bit different than ranking for common keywords and it is a complex subject that will probably be the topic of a future post.

Thank you for your work and post, I think “Ranking in local results is a bit different than ranking for common keywords and it is a complex subject that will probably be the topic of a future post.” Would be the most helpful to small businesses who mostly service there immediate locations first before expanding out. If you can point me to any post or page that covers that topic I would appreciate it. Otherwise, I look forward to your next article. J

What I do believe is that the authority is not related with links and popularity. It includes Google Page Rank and many other factors. So, if you can build something REALLY good for the community or niche you´re targeting, that will help you a lot.

I don´t know but I still believe in the power of "word of mouth" just like in the real world....

Once you get good -or bad- reputation, everything will be moving in that way :)

I think that the real secret to the changes Google is making is that site content matters alot more than links now. But the catch-22 is that Google is creating a new type of spam - site spam. Google doesnt seem to understand that more content is not better content. So they are rewarding sites that have lots of (excuse my french) crap on them. It is the new form of web spam - website content spam. So if you want to rank well, dont create the best products in the world, or the best articles, just create the MOST articles and MOST product variations. When ebay, amazon, etsy, pinterest, cafepress, etc. and a few other big sites take up the top 8 spaces of every commerical term search, you know that Google has lost their way.

Great article and good read, Philip. Thanks for that. :-) Just a short question, do you think the number of given search results is relevant for SEO? I think there was an article on the correlation of number of search results and ranking some time ago here on Seomoz, but have to look it up. Anyhow, what do you people think about this topic?

Hi Philip, first of all I will take this opportunity to thank you for the Advance web ranking tool. Using it for the last 6 months with Big-G and its of great help. I am in this search industry for last one year and still consider my self in the learning period. Posts from the industry experts like you are always helps young SEOs like me. The experience you guys hold and research done is always informative and helpful. Thanks for the awesome post...

I gotta say... I think more of it will be down to the content being within an already trusted and relevant domain, and internal link juice flowing to the page than is given credit for here.

In December last year I made a petition site (with an already indexed domain) for something that got a LOT of shares, tweets, likes, etc... including from very influential people in that area over the next couple of months, but it still didn't rank for even obscure longtail stuff until it got a few links.

I agree that social signals are great, but more on there own merit for what they can do for branding, awareness, etc... than as a ranking factor. For this site I'm speaking of, they didn't do squat for rankings even for a day or so. On that, I think it's got to be down to other things why it got ranked for a while in order to accrue links at the start.

I'm sure social signals will play a larger part as ranking factors in time, but for the moment would Google really put its life in the hands of its competitors that much?

Authority or link popularity, what came first :D You brought that down to science in this post. I do wonder how much the result count actually shows the competitiveness especially in broad keyword phrases.

i don't see any rankings for the keyword "camper shoes" in google.co.uk. Sometimes if u have a good blog you can rank but it will last only for few days. Same applies to social signals. And in reallity its very difficult to get that one, when social is divided among users.

Nice one is a small peice of word for this post becuase you done a great job in this post, most of the time i understand these corelated graph but sometime i am unable to get the idea but still i got much data from this thanks man. Social share always work but it should be shared by reputable accounts.

Thanks for the article, it shows in charts and numbers what I've been observing and making a mental-note of these past few weeks. It's nice to have this confirmed in a scientific break-down like this that I could probably never put together.

I don't know why the talking heads get this wrong all the time. That said, it remains in our best interest that you continue spreading incorrect information when it comes to "keyword competition". You received a #2 rank because your blog post was "recent" and had the most relevant TITLE TAG and on-page factors for the search term "find images for blog post". You weren't COMPETING with 4 BILLION pages. That's an incorrect implication and is one of the many ways SEO hacks scam clients with seemingly impressive returns in the SERPS (not calling you a hack, please don't misinterpret). Your actual competion for that search term is 10...pages...period...among 4 BILLION. Just 10. I could cough on that search term and be #1 in a day and over a week create enough votes to stick for months. Just sayin'...